Gallery 16 is pleased to present “Together We Make Things Happen”, an immersive solo exhibition by Oakland-based artist Nathaniel Parsons. The title of the show is a reflection of the artist’s interest in how we come together to coexist. The artist presents over 100 pieces spanning nearly 25 years of his career, offering viewers an exploration of his unique approach to artmaking. Parsons will transform the gallery with an ambitious installation, a complex web of past and present works that blend into one another. The work can be seen as a type of totem pole that combines diverse stories into one overlapping narrative. In native traditions, totem poles weren’t objects of worship, but devices for community storytelling. Similarly, Parsons’s art, made with found materials, deflects reverence and instead honors coexisting histories.

Nathaniel Parsons’s work has roots in folk art, narrative painting, wood carving and a community-building social practice. He is known for drawing heavily from rural Americana, outsider artwork and naturalist writing. Found and scavenged materials are regularly employed, as the artist favors those that have a well-worn history. Parsons values the embedded history within each element, seeing this choice as a process of building upon history, rather than creating autonomous objects without a past. Previous projects have involved visitors taking walks with the artist while he works or creating public picnic tables that are carved as a community project. Generosity, friendship and shared vision guide his projects and viewers are able to see themselves in the creation of Parson’s distinct works.

“When does a story get to be a tall tale, how is a moral born, and if the artist has a desire to consider all that, when and where does it become relevant?”  Nathaniel Parsons

About the artist: Nathaniel Parsons was raised in Chagrin Falls, Ohio, among a family of artists. He graduated with a BFA from California College of the Arts (Oakland) in 1993 and with an MFA from the University of Iowa with a concentration in painting, printmaking, sculpture, drawing, and performance. His art practice explores themes of alter egos, visiting parks, shared authorship, and storytelling. As an observational artist, he chooses to work on projects, new, worn and carved from what appears needed to get the job done. Paintings are made on surfaces where some element comes from a found source, stretcher bars, milled wood, cut offs. There is a continual effort to reach Point Sublime. He’s sung songs in a band called Little My, playing shows and making souvenirs for the audience. He has shown projects nationally in Memphis, Chicago, Cincinnati, Oakland and Cleveland and internationally in The Republic of Macedonia. He lives and works in Oakland California.

CULT | Aimee Friberg Exhibition’s is pleased to present their inaugural exhibition VECINOS in a new Fell Street location opening on Friday, October 27 and running through January 20. VECINOS features five prominent artists living and working in Mexico: Eduardo Sarabia, Cynthia Gutiérrez, Gonzalo Lebrija, Gabriel Rico and Gwladys Alonzo. Aged between 26 and 45, they represent different career points within a new generation emerging from Mexico and gaining notoriety in international circles.. Most established are Gonzalo Lebrija and Eduardo Sarabia each of whom have exhibited extensively internationally –Sarabia has a concurrent solo exhibition at the Mistake Room Los Angeles,. Cynthia Gutiérrez, whose work is currently presented in the 57th Biennale di Venezia has a solo museum exhibition currently at the SCAD Museum of Art in Savannah.

VECINOS explores the relationship between memory and place. With varied types of production and distinct methodologies the artists explore notions of modernity, citizenship and socio-political impact. Each has an embedded microhistory that speaks to the traditions of place and a distinct socio-cultural landscape. Throughout the exhibition, these artists examine collective memory and individual perception, whether putting a lens to narratives that define place, or utilizing materials and processes associated with a specific region.

Eduardo Sarabia’s work utilizes folklore, traditional craft and a mythology of Mexico’s resent and past history. His series of traditional blue and white Talavera ceramics (produced in collaboration with Guadalajara based Suro Ceramics) depicts contemporary imagery of the Mexican narcos. Whether proffered as a temptation directed at youth to join cartels or badges of worth, the ‘girls, drugs, and power that come hand in hand with goods of the drug trade’ are translated here into traditional motifs. For his resent paintings, Sarabia uses photographic snap shots as a palette to paint larger paintings, obscuring the original subject by the blobs of paint – the final result is a palimpsest of experiences altered, reminding us how the past is shaped over time.

Gonzalo Lebrija has used the mediums of video, photography and sculpture to examine notions of time resulting in playful works with layers of meaning. His recent series of deconstructed/unfolded paper airplanes and paintings from unfolded paper, bring up questions of memory and transference. The austere geometry of the folds, alluding to the paper in another form, remind us that nothing is static. The reference of making paper airplanes points to a youthful symbol of imagination and crossing distance. The oil painting Veladura 3 suggests formal aerodynamics with a translucent layering of colors.

Through her research-oriented projects Cynthia Gutiérrez has used a number of mediums including drawing, painting, video, ready-made, sculpture and tapestries to explore the ways in which identity or nationalism are embedded in objects, in particular monuments. The artist analyzes the ongoing adherence to ethical and political gestures depicted by aesthetic parameters. Whether through comical sculptural forms or deconstructing text as a formal gesture, Gutiérrez examines the inherent entropy in today’s narratives. Her work Deepwater Pagliacci alludes to the Italian composer Ruggero Leoncavallo’s tragic clown opera and the oil-rig Deepwater Horizon. For Ecos de un imperio II, from 2014, the artist painstakingly removed fragments of a text set in drywall boards. The deconstructed passage is Costa Rican author Carlos Gagini’s La caida de Aguila (The Fall of the Eagle), a political science fiction novel from 1914 that imagines a future war where South American allies defeat a very powerful and expanding United States nation.

An archeologist at heart, and architecturally trained, Gabriel Rico is interested in gedanken-experiments: a term Einstein used to describe his unique approach of using conceptual rather than actual experiments to imagine potential consequences. Utilizing found objects and taxidermy, Rico’s sculptures and installations question our relationship to time, nature and place through the lens of philosophy, science and mysticism. In his wall-hanging sculpture Reductio ad absurdum, 2016 a neon light is shaped as the mathematical symbol of square root and a small boulder is placed inside, acting as the principle of that square root. The title aptly references a form of argument that attempts to disprove a statement by showing it is inevitably ridiculous and absurd. Through this playful assemblage, Rico questions the natural order of existence and the value of humans within it.

Also recontextualizing found objects and common materials, Gwladys Alonzo melds and re-appropriates forms into sculptures that demonstrate a precarious vulnerability. She utilizes classic materials such as metal, wax, concrete, marble and stone, while using unconventional techniques. Her structural gestures embody humor, and question stereotypes associated with the predominantly male practice of sculpture, where eminently phallic verbs such as ‘erect’, ‘raise’, ‘train’ and ‘recover’ are part of the vocabulary. Her works Acapulco 1 and Acapulco II are site-specific interventions made on site at the new gallery location with concrete, wire, spray enamel and mirrored Plexiglas.

CULT has an ongoing relationship with Mexican artists and galleries. CULT gave Mexico City based artist Pablo Davila his first US exhibition in May 2016, presented in Mexico’s premier fair Zona Maco in 2016 and led a curatorial tour of galleries, artist studios and museums in Mexico City with the San Francisco Mexico Consulate earlier this year. This exhibition VECINOS, will be the first of several cross-gallery collaborations South and Central American galleries and institutional partners.

CULT | Aimee Friberg Exhibitions would like to thank the Consulate General of Mexico in San Francisco for their very generous support of this exhibition, Surro Ceramics for their aid in shipping from Guadalajara, and Les Lunes natural wine and CALA Restaurant for their contributions to the opening night party. A percentage of sales from the exhibition will benefit continued earthquake relief in Mexico and immigrant communities affected by the Northern California wildfires.

Bass & Reiner will be ceding our gallery space for the month of December to conceptual artist Mads Lynnerup. Meant to operate as an intermediary between the artist's studio and the exhibition space, Test Kitchen will be open to the public when the artist is present and will have constantly changing work in progress displayed when he is away. Recognizing the inherently performative aspects of art production, Lynnerup will engage with the audience at his discretion.

The contemporary role of option provides an illusion to allay a sense of entrapment in our daily structure quieting a never-ending loop of collapsed feedback by promise of change reliant on option. In regards to this illusionary state (that one is free to decide upon change when presented with what is assumed as an option but is essentially a corroded strategy for sameness), is the idea that one accepts what is offered or receives more of the same resulting in no option at all. The construct of option accelerates the fallacy of a personal elect in a daily ultimatum game as it pertains to our current social climate.

The invisible arena of option is an event in and of itself requiring a provocation of its pre-programmed cultural aim to expose its true boundary. In a time where traditional protest methodology proves outmoded in ability and information networks reflect strategy over dialogue, the options provided to individuals seeking change arrive pre-coded circumventing active alterations, blind of intention – a continual Hobson’s choice. Contemporary option as we know it, when assumed as a freedom-based exercise in individual power, is largely impotent as an act of defiance against the system it develops within. Yet freedom, reliant on option and the allowance it seeks in suggestion of actual self-governing, is heralded as our greatest asset. Given our options, the clock rewinds and the positions shift within the same structure.

Realizing the potential of each work individually or taken as a whole, Option to the Death of Freedom attempts to allow a continual inquiry beyond the half-life of contemporary option, a mediation presented as crossing many complex and current social issues. Contributing artists exhibit practices that allow for transparency and literalism while at times allowing materialism a central charge. As an appeal against the false nature of option in the wake of considered societal, economic, and cultural freedoms, the exhibition allows expression of protest and in some cases visual confrontation towards the lack of true clarity.

Andrew Tosiello presents a revised value of authorship through an algorithmic lottery in WHATSANAUTHOR,THEDEATHOFTHEAUTHOR,PIERREMENARD,AUTHOROFTHEQUIXOTE (2016). The seminal texts by Foucault (1969), Barthes (1967) and Jorge Luis Borges (1939) are reassembled in python code and presented in an algorithmic order rendering the concentrations meaningless.

Mads Lynnerup exposes realities of the economically disenfranchised and marginalised through a selection of his 2007-09 silkscreen posters, Build More Luxury Condoms, Now Firing, and If You See Anything Interesting Let Someone Know Immediately, the former being a slogan derived from the anti-terrorist posters produced for the M.T.A. during the post-9/11 climate (If you see something, say something), working as a preemptive approach to acts of the “un-American.”

John Edmonds ‘Hoods’ (2016-17) presents cultural identification through photographic representation, herein specifically blackness and maleness. Through his photographs Edmonds confirms the paradox of a simultaneous hypervisibility and invisibility witnessed through highly racialized visual markers, and evidenced through a continued culture of violence based on the “other”. Using elements of controlled imagery (a faceless hooded portrait), Edmonds reproduces the conditions of a visual artificial boundary as demonstrative of the racially-driven structures that attempt to equally dominate and diminish the experience of blackness through the process of racialization.

Evidence (1977) by Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel is considered a seminal foundation in conceptual practice based in photographic mediums that attempt to decentralize narrative and authorship. In this way Sultan and Mandel present the issue of ownership- visual or causal, to examine American corporations, institutions and agencies tasked with the technological advancement of American future, while presenting a stationless visual sequence for consideration.

Frank Heath addresses the tension between the human and the mechanical, the successes and grave failures of communication and its breakdown. In Made to be Found (2014), two filmmakers seek props and direction in the aisles of a department store, the words of CERN physicists overseeing the Large Hadron Collider echoing in their heads. Made to be Found considers the relationship between the technologies pushing us toward collapse and the apocalyptic scenarios we incessantly invent.

Whitney Claflin’s site specific installation ‘Forget Marriage’ is created directly on the wall through lighter burns.

Dan Herschlein’s practice revolves around the amateur and exploratory pursuit of psyche through the horror genre. Inner turmoil and the weight of expectation as it pertains to the reaction and morphing of the body ultimately confronts one’s emotional limit. This nihilistic sort of romanticism and its aftermath of physical detritus becomes symbols of the inevitable failure of transcendence, and what it means to be human.

William Koone explores how contemporary visual rhetoric is constructed by bringing into focus the physical support systems that facilitate it. Koone utilizes photographic tropes, such as commercial backdrops, to illuminate the production and fabrication of images. Utilizing a variety of media, Koone’s objects describe our contemporary culture, where the commercial image is ubiquitous. All capital generated by the sale of Koone’s work is fully directed into The Stipend, a Bay Area-based grant initiative co-founded by Koone, financially assisting artists to realize exhibitions locally.

A cold breeze shuddered the trees in the park, at a distance the town square clock struck midnight in a horror style.

A narrow path led down, through from the old pitch lined by straight walls of foliage.

Silk gloved hands deep in my starched greatcoat’s pockets, each step just long enough to not force a violent crease and buckle.

Early autumn leaves covered the gravel in tones of grey, rustling softly.

Through the shrubs a flicker of light turned the top of my spine sharply cold.

By the memorial fountain the path spread out into an airy oval, rows of trees replaced by strictly hewn geometrical shapes, each just past mansized.

Creepy slow bubbles appeared on the surface of a puddle.

Patches of grass in sandy mud turned to cobblestone as I turned left into a sidestreet, high walls hid but a thin line of sky, overcast.

The strike of one, even more ghastly than the last, echoed through the alley.

As it passed, the want of a follow-up made the clacking of my shoes unbearably present. In a doorway I could make out a shadowy shape. I waited a while watching from the curb, it was moving but wouldn’t wake up and was not alive

The air carried the rancid and sweet remnants of something burning.

There was a crack in the fence to the storage center housed in the old department store. Well inside the breeze stagnated, a thick layer of dust covered the curved walnut bannisters and softened the transition between pillars and floor.

In some places the beams of the ceiling were bulging under the weight of stacked office furniture above.

Clogged up air conditioning vents vibrated and seemed to give off an inaudible sound.

I felt quite weakened and with the last drops of blood available in my fingers I inscribed a Bill for Revision of the Rule of Succession onto the walls;

Amendments to the present act of Succession, it is my Will that the Monarchy remains in most crucial aspects unaltered and in its present State, the only change I propose is that the Crown be passed on by Regicide. Should the claimant by accident cause injury to any other persons or damage to property in the endeavor, all present Laws would be applicable.’

SAN FRANCISCO, CA: Crown Point Press announces the group exhibition “Degrees of Abstraction.” It presents fifteen artists who explore the visual language of abstraction and features six new color etchings by New York artist Mary Heilmann.

“Looking at abstract art is like doing non-verbal philosophy, symbolic logic or non-number mathematics,” Heilmann has said. “It is like music, because it has a narrative without a story, without people: a drama without words.” The exhibition investigates threads that tie together a group of abstract artists. It connects now stalwarts such as Mary Heilmann and Pat Steir with a younger generation that includes Tomma Abts and John Zurier. On view November 2 to January 13, “Degrees of Abstraction” demonstrates the enduring vitality of non-representational art for over four decades. There will be an opening reception on Thursday, November 2, 5-8pm.

The exhibition selects from prints made by artists working in the Crown Point studio from 1981 to 2017. Heilmann’s third project at the press was in September 2017. Each artist uses his or her own abstract vocabulary to draw, paint, carve, or assemble art. London-based painter Tomma Abts, for example, is primarily concerned with precision, form, and illusion and has said she allows the image to develop from the process of creating itself. Al Held, who arrived in New York at the height of Abstract Expressionism in the 1950s, applied two-point perspective and geometry to his abstractions. New York-based Jacqueline Humphries subtly addresses cultural issues by incorporating grids of emojis in her work, simultaneously referring to 21st century language and art history’s ben-day dots.

Mary Heilmann, using a loose, active style and distinctive, bright colors, captures “the spirit of an age,” as art critic Iwona Blazwick has noted. Heilmann’s art is rooted in memory, and her titles at times allude to those origins. “New Lineup,” for example, suggests the rhythmic procession of waves breaking on the shore during time spent at the ocean.

San Francisco painter John Zurier, in a similar vein, creates a sense of lyricism and nostalgia in his work. His atmospheric, monochrome canvases often refer to his time spent in Iceland and sometimes to poetry in which he has found inspiration. Sculptor Leonardo Drew culls wood, metal, and other found objects into heavily textured, loosely gridded, and typically massive forms. The elements of each sculpture, he has said, come together to create musical tones. New York artist Pat Steir drips, pours, and flings paint from a high ladder onto her large canvases, abstracting waterfalls, constellations, and other elements of nature. The exhibition also presents prints by Anne Appleby, Richard Diebenkorn, Bertrand Lavier, Sol LeWitt, Alyson Shotz, Amy Sillman, Richard Tuttle, and Charline von Heyl.

“Degrees of Abstraction” is on display in the Crown Point Gallery at 20 Hawthorne Street, San Francisco, November 2, 2017 – January 13, 2018. On November 2, neighborhood galleries Crown Point Press, Gagosian, and Berggruen are open concurrently for a reception from 5-8pm. Crown Point’s regular gallery hours are Monday 10-5 and Tuesday through Saturday 10-6.

Et al. is proud to present Jam Session, a two-person show of work by Betty Bailey and Johanna Billing. This will be the inaugural show in our new second location on Mission Street at 24th Street.

Betty Bailey’s drawings are highly personal, each an intimate peek at something that for a moment caught Bailey’s fancy. A moment on a daytime talk show, a dirty joke told to her by a friend, a group of people form some kind of temporary community whether waiting in line or smoking together – these moments are rendered from memory in bright colors as images at once fanciful and honest.

Johanna Billing’s films stage events neither completely familiar nor abstract. In Pulheim Jam Session actors/characters asked to do things within their own vernacular make improvisation and composition push and pull at one. The result is at once a directed film project and the capture of individuals at ease with themselves, a documentary with a hard to pin down subject or narrative.

Betty Bailey was born in 1939 in Antigo, Wisconsin. She has lived in Port Costa, California for the last fifty years. She has exhibited extensively since 1970 at venues such as David Stewart Gallery, Los Angeles; The Oakland Museum of California; The Richmond Art Center; The Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento; Parker Gallery, Los Angeles; Feuer/Mesler Gallery, New York; US Blues Fine Art, Brooklyn; and in Crockett, California where she and her husband Clayton Bailey run the Bailey Art Museum, open every Saturday and Sunday from 1 to 5pm.

Ever Gold [Projects] and Marc Horowitz present a new series of paintings and sculptures that explore the idea of time-based glitches and how a glitch can occur in lived experience. A glitch can be mundane—like the malfunction of a screen or speaker—but the time-based glitches Horowitz refers to are disorienting, creating rifts in time, space, and perspective. The works are designed to demonstrate the way in which a glitch—typically considered a mistake—might produce new spaces and new feelings with unexpected value.

The paintings begin with underpaintings replicating prints by New York-based mass printmakers Currier & Ives, active in the 19th and early 20th centuries. These underpaintings—which reference the very early conception of the American dream, the idea of manifest destiny, and the beginnings of American exceptionalism—are then overlaid with disparate forms and areas of color. The sculptures exhibit a similar approach, with the artist taking the traditional sculptural portrait format of the bust as a point of departure and creating an unexpected composite through the addition of new forms and materials.

Marc Horowitz (b. 1976) is a Los Angeles-based artist working in painting, performance, video, photography, and social practice. In a practice that combines traditional drawing, commercial photography, and new media, Horowitz turns American culture on its head to explore the idiosyncrasies of entertainment, class, commerce, failure, success, and personal meaning. Using visual puns, large-scale participatory projects, and viral social pranks, Horowitz creates environments of high energy that lift the most mundane to the status of grand event in complex interplays between subject, viewer, and participant. Horowitz holds a master’s degree in Art from the University of Southern California, and bachelor’s degrees in both Art and Marketing from San Francisco Art Institute, and Indiana University Kelley School of Business respectively.

Horowitz has had solo exhibitions at China Art Objects in Los Angeles, The Depart Foundation in Los Angeles, Johannes Vogt in New York, The Hayward Gallery in London, and at New Langton Arts in San Francisco. He received a project grant from Creative Time for their first online-based project. His work has been featured extensively on local and national television including ABC News, NPR Weekend Edition, CBS Inside Edition CBS, CNN American Morning, and on NBC’s The Today Show. He has lectured at The Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, California Institute of the Arts, Stanford University, and Yale University. He has taught at the University of Southern California and developed a course in Post-Internet Art at Otis College with his partner, Petra Cortright.

Fraenkel Gallery is pleased to present Adam Fuss: Liquids 1987—2017, an exhibition spanning three decades and including new works created over the past year. On view through December 23, this will be Fuss’ ninth solo exhibition at the gallery.

Liquids, and their infinite variety of forms, have been a central preoccupation for Fuss since his earliest works made in the 1980s. This exhibition, through an in-depth focus on this single element so essential to human life, explores the expressive potential of liquids in a variety of dynamic states. Made without a camera, Fuss’s photograms and daguerreotypes are distilled to the essential components of the photographic medium: light, subject matter, and photo-sensitive paper or metal.

From its beginnings, Fuss’s work has evoked the essential and spiritual elements of the natural world. Fuss magnifies the versatile and transitional nature of liquids when in motion, and when acted upon, in varied photographs of rain, glycerin drops, waterfalls, and snakes rippling along the surface of still water.

Fuss was born in England in 1961, and has lived and worked in New York City since 1982. His works are included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, among many others. His work has been the subject of numerous monographs. A comprehensive traveling survey of Fuss’s work was mounted by Fundación MAPFRE in Madrid in 2011.

Join us at Minnesota Street Projects on Friday, November 3rd at 6pm for a conversation between Adam Fuss and Klea McKenna.

San Francisco, Calif.—Hackett Mill presents Decades in the Making, a group show of seminal artists from the twentieth century. This special exhibition marks the opening of the gallery’s new location adjacent to SFMOMA in San Francisco’s thriving downtown district. Curated by gallery partners Francis Mill and Michael Hackett, Decades in the Making is a retrospective survey of the gallery’s own programming history and brings together masterful artists who each challenged the status quo of the art world in their respective time and place in profound and trailblazing ways. Designed to parallel the Hackett Mill curatorial philosophy of confronting the myth making of the mid twentieth century avant-garde, Decades in the Making presents unique and surprising juxtapositions of artworks crossing genres and eras, and a re-examination of how these artists made history by working against trends and staying true to their personal vision—a theme that also defines the gallery’s identity.

Decades in the Making is a rotating show and will bring together many different artists over a period of months so that viewers are offered multiple and evolving perspectives as the exhibition unfolds. The work in the exhibition has been selected from private collections reflecting Hackett’s and Mill’s substantial journey in building important collections over the decades. Notable examples by Richard Diebenkorn, Elmer Bischoff, Frank Lobdell, Howard Hodgkin, Hans Hofmann, Conrad Marca-Relli, Joan Mitchell, Robert Motherwell, David Park, Pierre Soulages, Manuel Neri, Antoni Tapies and many more will be presented.

Paired together for the first time, David Park and Milton Avery both notably shirked the trend of pure abstraction so central to mid twentieth century art, though they came to this mode of expression in different artistic communities on the two different American coasts. While both painter’s figurative work espoused aspects of the formal language of abstraction, they used figuration as framework to push the possibilities of abstraction’s emotional power forward. As the founder of the Bay Area Figurative movement, Park initiated a historic new direction in painting and what is now considered the region’s most singular contribution to twentieth century American art. Seeing his work in proximity to Avery offers viewers the rare opportunity to see two seminal figures together who profoundly influenced the path of American painting.

Decades in the Making juxtaposes work from Richard Diebenkorn's Ocean Park series with selected works from Howard Hodgkin to examine the concept of a threshold as it relates to formal aspects of painting. Hodgkin who considered himself a realist, was also a supreme colorist interested in capturing specific memories and feelings. Hodgkin paints his frames into the picture plane as a way of “protecting” his memories. Inversely, Diebenkorn was interested in communicating painting’s lack of threshold by emphasizing the flatness of the painting’s surface. In his Ocean Park series, the viewer sees Diebenkorn’s deep interest in process with traces of reworked surfaces and subtle shifts and allusions to marks that were ultimately modified.

Also represented will be Pierre Soulages, the renowned French abstractionist whose outrenoir (beyond black) method characterizes a personal fixation with the color black and its capabilities for and limitations of reflecting light. Soulages’s work is notable for its spontaneous relationship with medium and unconventional use of tools; he works on the floor with wide stiff brushes to maintain grooves and moves paint with rubber and spatulas to elongate curves and shape the painting’s topography. Contrasting a deep relationship with paint, Spanish artist Antoni Tapies used detritus and other non-traditional art material to play with the idea of alchemy. Through a transformation of everyday material into art, Tapies made politically charged work to signify protest of class issues and present a paradox of creation and destruction.

A limited edition catalogue of Decades in the Making will be available for purchase during the course of the exhibition.

About Hackett Mill’s new location
Hackett Mill makes its new home at 145 Natoma Street in San Francisco. Located next door to the SFMOMA in a building the San Francisco Chronicle’s urban design critic John King calls an “idiosyncratic gem,” the new space abandons the traditional gallery model of separated areas for exhibitions, offices and a back room and is instead boldly and unapologetically open throughout. The way the space embraces and showcases art is more reflective of co-owners Michael Hackett and Francis Mill’s philosophy of living with and experiencing art on a daily basis.

The renovation of the full-floor gallery draws inspiration from design icons including Charles and Ray Eames and Donald Judd and their studio aesthetic of minimalism and efficiency. Mill used his background as an artist and architect to carefully consider and execute each design detail to provide an effective environment in which one can experience and learn about fine art. The challenge of limited space in an urban setting is poetically resolved through design solutions such as moveable walls that blur the lines between public and private space. These shifting architectural components allow for seamless transitions between exhibitions, conversations, research, study and the other myriad of functions of the gallery program.

In addition to the new Natoma location, Hackett Mill has created a separate atelier to the gallery in a national historic landmark building in the Financial District for special presentations and exhibitions. The atelier allows visitors the experience of viewing artwork curated for and within an intimate space, underscoring Hackett Mill’s philosophical emphasis on living with art.

About Hackett Mill
Hackett Mill, founded by Michael Hackett and Francis Mill, presents rare works from the 1950s and 1960s by significant American, European, and Asian artists. The gallery provides a platform for unique juxtapositions between the historical and the contemporary by offering a contextual and scholarly scaffolding to create exciting collections that span movements and eras, united by the universal truth of the artistic struggle. Engaging their passion and deep insight for art and architecture, Hackett and Mill share a genuine and infectious enthusiasm for creating unique and personalized client experiences, imparting erudite and inspirational perspectives for building collections.

Hackett and Mill each bring over thirty years of expertise and education in fine arts. Mill earned a BA in architecture and a BFA and MFA in fine art. Painting since the age of 4 and after college, Mill began exhibiting his work in San Francisco in the 1980s. He began teaching at the age of 24 and was professor and dean of graduate studies at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco for ten years, which informs his scholarly approach to building collections. Michael Hackett also tapped into his passion for art early in childhood; by the 1980s, he knew his role would be found in nurturing artistic talents and has now been dealing and collecting art on an international level for over thirty years. Together Hackett and Mill combine their expertise toward developing meaningful and inspired collections, exhibitions, and lectures and building long lasting relationships with their clients.

The gallery represents the estates of David Park, Frank Lobdell, Robert Schwartz and the artists David Beck, Masatoyo Kishi, Manuel Neri, Raimonds Staprans and Brian Wall.

Hashimoto Contemporary is pleased to present our first annual Winter Group Show. The exhibition welcomes a variety of new artists to the gallery, representing the incredible creative talent growing locally and abroad.

The wide array of work ranges from the delicately minimal works of Kristin Texeira and Louis Reith to the figurative sculptures by Cannon Dill and Kate Klingbeil. Afton Love and Chyrum Lambert deconstruct forms of landscape in their individually unconventional mixed-media practices. The gestural paintings of Ally White and Emma Webster are featured alongside harmonious still lifes by Ryan Whelan and Liz Hernandez. Other highlights include the humorous work of Sean-McGee Phetsarath, the vibrant compositions of Clark Goolsby, an evocative installation by Mario Wagner, and the imaginative paintings of Harley Lafarrah Eaves and A. Savage. The gallery is also looking forward to debuting the beloved ceramic work of Lorien Stern in anticipation of her upcoming February solo show FRIENDSHIP. The exhibition’s innovative roster of artists focuses on the emerging discourse surrounding the new contemporary scene.

Please join us for our Winter Group Show, opening Thursday, November 30 with an evening reception from 6pm – 9pm. The exhibition will be on view through Friday, December 22.

Andrew Schoultz brings his signature street-savvy style to a new body of work that questions the meaning and function of public space and the nature of political discourse. With an emphasis on the formal vocabulary of abstraction, Schoultz exposes the ways in which meaning is manipulated and perception skewed as the locus for civic debate has shifted from the town plaza to the isolated, anonymous realm of cyberspace.

Two monumental sculptures anchor the installation, surrounded by murals painted directly on the walls of the gallery, paintings on panel and paper, and other sculptural objects. In a new series of abstract paintings, Schoultz distills some of his familiar stylistic elements into a more formal language with subtler allusions. Other works incorporate new symbolic motifs with multiple, sometimes conflicting meanings. As an example, the snake features prominently. Depending upon your cultural heritage, religious beliefs, or political persuasion, it can denote fertility, transformation, protection, wisdom, eternity, healing, anti-government resistance, racism, treachery or original sin.

In the age of Trump, truth is a questionable commodity, peddled like a trinket for short-term gain. Is this really a new phenomenon, or simply one that has emerged brazenly from the shadows, to operate with impunity in the full light of day? Schoultz’s work situates itself squarely within current socio-political concerns, illuminating the battleground of a sharply divided country.

Andrew Schoultz was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in 1975 and currently resides in Los Angeles. A major solo exhibition occupying the entire museum was presented by the Monterey Art Museum in 2013, and Schoultz is currently preparing for a solo exhibition at the Fort Wayne Museum of Art in Indiana in 2018. He has painted outdoor murals worldwide, including most recently in Beirut, Manila, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Toronto. His work is in the collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Berkeley Art Museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, and many others. This is his second solo exhibition at Hosfelt Gallery.

Jack Fischer Gallery is pleased to present constructs 2.0 a two-person show by Marc D’Estout and Jay Kelly at our Potrero gallery.

The pairing of these two meticulous sculptors exposes us to a triumph of handwork by two masters in their overlapping mediums with different takes on form and surface.

Exploring social and obscure formal connections via his minimalist sculptures and drawings, Marc D'Estout's work often reveals a dark humor or uncanny associations, addressing lurking fears, personal (mis) communication, social nuance, or pop humor. D’Estout has a deep connection with materials and process, predominantly the challenging skills of hand-shaping sheet metal forms, which are then finished with carefully crafted surfaces. His style falls somewhere between the fine art metalsmith and those of artisans who hand-form custom car bodies. His life-long love of automobiles is integral to his visual language and his studio practice, although there is a world of difference in objective and approach in his work. The application of D’Estout’s vision through these highly disciplined craft-based processes is unique in the context of contemporary art.

Jay Kelly began his career as a photorealist painter who shifted his focus towards abstraction in the late 90's. Moving away from his remarkably rendered realist paintings, Kelly's practice evolved into a completely anti-representational body of work. With a deft execution of materials such as metal, wood, nickel, silver, gesso, Japanese paper and acrylic paint, Kelly creates a vast world of miniature abstract forms that confusingly and pleasingly read monumental in spite of the intimacy they demand. The sculptures play on the human psyche and will be presented in the gallery space as a community of biomorphic, organic and oddly referential constructions. Calling to mind the work of Martin Puryear, Paul Klee, Alexander Calder, and Tim Burton, the work's clean lines and minimal aesthetic also allude to 20th century modernist architecture and furniture.

Marc D’Estout is a multi-disciplinary artist, curator, art director and designer. He is currently represented by Jack Fischer Gallery in San Francisco. In addition, his work has been exhibited at numerous venues including: Aqua Miami, University of Hawai’i Art Gallery in Honolulu, Hawaii; Red Gallery at Savannah College of Art and Design, Savannah, GA; Houston Center for Contemporary Craft in Houston, TX; SFMOMA Artist’s Gallery, San Francisco, CA; Tercera Gallery, Palo Alto, CA; San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose, CA; de Saisset Museum, Santa Clara University, Santa Clara, CA; Bedford Gallery/Dean Lesher Center for the Arts, Walnut Creek, CA; San Jose ICA, San Jose, CA; and the Museum of Art and History, Santa Cruz, CA – as well as furniture and design galleries such and LIMN and Coup d’Etat in San Francisco and Gallery of Functional Art in Santa Monica, LA. D'Estout holds an MFA degree from San Jose State University.

The work of Jay Kelly is in collections such as The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY; The British Museum, London, England; Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton, NJ; Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT, among others. His work has been exhibited extensively in venues such as Jack Fischer Gallery in San Francisco, CA; Carl Hammer Gallery in Chicago, IL; Jim Kempner Fine Art in New York, NY; The Contemporary Museum Honolulu in Honolulu, HI, Museo de Arte Contemporaneo Esteban Vicente in Segovia, Spain. Kelly earned his BA from Syracuse University.

We are pleased to announce “hoodwink by didactix” by Juan Carlos Quintana, the third solo show of the artist with the gallery. Join us for the opening reception November 4, from 4:00 to 6:00 p.m. at Minnesota Street Project gallery #104. The exhibition will be up through December 30, 2017.

Quintana’s work is known to not pull any punches. In this new body of work, he continues to search for a just world. The characters portrayed in his paintings are the heroes and villains of these tumultuous times. The villains are oblivious to the havoc they wreak. He manages to capture the defiance of heroes, which can be lovely and yet heartbreaking, reminding us of the music that is defiantly blissful in the face of adversity.

Artist’s Statement

We are all hoodwinked into believing in one thing or another. We are schooled at an early age that a certain ideology is best for us that patriotism and love for a country is important or a certain religion can give us salvation. Popular culture has taught us that to be happy you need to accumulate monetary wealth and obtain a certain social status. We are seduced into believing that a so-called “American Dream” is attainable if you work hard enough.

I see these paintings as social commentaries or observation of the times we are living in. I wish to memorialize a moment in time where we are bearing witness to the hubris, incompetence, arrogance, folly and violence, in a culture that emboldens racist hate groups and xenophobic attitudes. While the powers that be fervently gaslight the populace, any sense of reason is thrown out the window.

The paintings oscillate between being didactic and cryptic. Despite having a dystopian outlook, the works portray a humorous and raucous open ended narrative full of inflatable dancing blow-up men, predatory housing billboards that promote wealth inequality and gentrification, and nouveau riche on their way to a trendy art fair.

About the Artist

Juan Carlos Quintana (b.1964, Lutcher, Louisiana) is primarily a self-taught artist raised in New Orleans, Louisiana of Cuban lineage. He is a 2016 recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant. Currently living and working in Oakland, California, he has exhibited in many venues nationally and internationally including at the Jack Fischer Gallery, John Berggruen Gallery, and Galeria de la Raza in San Francisco, CA, as well as at the San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose, CA, Skyline College, San Bruno, CA, and Torrance Museum of Art, Torrence, CA, among others. Internationally, he's had solo exhibitions at the Freies Museum in Berlin and at the Centro de Desarollo de las Artes Visuales in Havana, Cuba and various group shows in the Philippines, Cuba and Germany. Quintana has been awarded artist residencies at the Djerassi Resident Program in Woodside, CA, and the Oberpfalzer Kunstlerhaus in Schwandorf, Germany and a collaborative residency with Artist Formerly Known As Friends (AFKAF) at EDELO in Chiapas, Mexico. He is co-founder of Random Parts Gallery, an artist-run gallery in Oakland, CA. He is represented by Jack Fischer Gallery in San Francisco, CA.

Jenkins Johnson Gallery is pleased to announce There Is No Alas Where I Live, a photography exhibition focusing on the works of
nine Bay Area photographers: Wesaam Al-Badry, Johanna Case-Hofmeister, Hiroyo Kaneko, Kathya Landeros,
Eva Lipman, Paccarik Orue, Mimi Plumb, Josh Smith, and Lewis Watts. Ann Jastrab, former gallery director at RayKo
Photo Center in San Francisco, has selected images from the various projects of these documentary photographers. Collectively
their pictures speak of the strength of humanity and the triumph over odds. Life can be so magnificent and challenging
simultaneously. Photographs are documents of this dichotomy and photographers are witnesses, participant-observers, and
those who present truths. Beauty and truth. The title of this exhibition, There Is No Alas Where I Live, taken from a Theodore
Roethke poem*, signifies that there may be grief and concern in this life, but there is no pity and there is no regret.

Curator Ann Jastrab, who happens to be as obsessed with reading as she is with photography, has a constant stack of books

nearby, but while other volumes rotate out of the pile, Theodore Roethke’s collected works remain. There are certain poems

that resonate, and the one that has the dog-eared page this particular season is a poem titled simply: I Need, I Need.

In the curator’s words, it is when she gets to these lines that she
stops:

“I think of the documentary pictures I see, the ones that are personal or romantic or poignant or really just heart-rending, and I think of life, how it can be so magnificent and challenging simultaneously. Photographs are documents of this phenomenon,
this dichotomy, and photographers are witnesses, participant observers, lovers of life, those who rage over unfairness, and those who present truths. Beauty and truth.

There is no alas where I live.

There may be grief and there may be concern, but there is no pity. Really, there’s not. Because you can’t be alive, truly alive and use that word alas. It is a word akin to regret or being forced to accept those things that you don’t want to choose.

“There is no alas where I live. Not even close. Not when I look at Wesaam Al-Badry’s photographs of the Mississippi Delta and the strength of his subjects, how they look at the camera and state “Here I am.” Al-Badry made multiple trips to the Delta and he returned to report an important lesson: “It is easy to capture poverty; it’s much more difficult to capture the resilience and deep earthly bonds of a community and its solidarity.” Indeed. I saw in
his pictures a link to Lewis Watts’ images from his series, New Orleans Suite. There is a woman standing in front of her ruined home, destroyed by Hurricane Katrina, a few years have passed, yet she stands, defiant. There is no alas in her life. There is only what is to come. I am looking at a picture by Mimi Plumb, a burnt desert landscape, scorched palms, with a Doberman Pincher trotting through the ruins. It is exquisitely seen and yet, it is also a statement. Life persists and there is vitality in what remains. Perhaps danger too, but that is life.

“Such sentiments can be seen and felt in Paccarik Orue’s long term project, El Muqui. There is an image of a boy running on the edge of an open pit mine, one of the largest mines in the world, a giant cross placed on the edge of the cliff, he flies a kite against the backdrop of the devastated landscape. Life must go on. His image of 3 boys sitting on their bikes in an open dirt lot facing the camera, facing the future, facing reality. They are ready for what this future will bring. There is even this mood in Paccarik’s photograph of a tiny pink church with the missing roof opening up the interior to the blue sky. Inside there is a painted Christ who is rising up to the heavens despite the destruction of his temple and who seems to know inherently that there is no alas.

“Though maybe more of a romantic than a documentarian, this sense of boldness and honesty can be seen too in HiroyoKaneko’s images from her series, New Memories. Here in beautiful chromogenic prints made from her large format negatives, we see the four seasons unfolding with extremes: the spring bring showers of cherry blossoms, the fall an explosion of apples, the summer a blaze of burning sand with only one sheltering tree, the winter filled with unfathomable mountains of snow. The inhabitants of Hiroyo’s hometown of Aomori in Japan carry on amidst this excess: shoveling roofs and tunneling through snow banks after a season of picking literal tons of apples produced by a summer of solid light preceded by a spring on a bed of pink, red, yellow, and white petals. Her work is a poem in itself.

૾I bring in Johanna Case-Hofmeister’s work here: giant mural chromogenic prints of what will always seem to me to be the end of summer. Two girls are in the water, what they are doing is ambiguous, they might be friends, they might belovers, they might be children, they might be grown women, but what they are is beautiful as they struggle and float in anever-ending expanse of water.

And then there is Eva Lipman with her myriad projects spanning decades. I am captivated by her male series, The Making of Men, which shows us military camps, boy scout retreats, football practice, demolition derbies, strip clubs, rodeos, ballroom dancing, and proms, amongst other rites of passage. The work is intense and charged and these are moments that are fleeting and before our eyes these boys become men.

૾Josh Smith and his work from The First Years brings me back to the blur of my son’s toddlerhood. Even the way Josh has printed these images, the high key glowing skin of days that will only be remembered because he has photographed them...the rest will be lost to sleep deprivation and trying to find something in an avalanche of laundry. The photographer has been documenting his wife and young sons, two boys within two years, and the changes that occur with this infusion of life and expansion of family. To quote the artist, ”...the unremitting demands of parenthood contained joy, tenderness, vulnerability, frustration and fear all at once,૿but no alas. That is for certain.

“While Josh explores the intricacies of family, Kathya Landeros is also investigating a complex narrative. She grew up in the Central Valley of California and has documented Latino culture for years. Recently Aperture magazine published her series, West, in its spring issue ૾American Destiny,” which offers an urgent reflection on photography, labor, and community, and now these images will be seen in San Francisco. The resilience of the people she has been photographing, the agricultural workers and the land, their land, the water that has been fought over, the economy surrounding all this and the community that grows around it and in it and despite of it...it’s a lot. Sometimes Kathya moves in close and photographs the people, their very souls revealed. Sometimes she stands back and lets us look over the valley that has been her home. There is a long story here that seems to be captured perfectly in Kathya’s pictures. For me it is the end of the day depicted by the glowing green light inside a lavanderia on a dusty street underneath a pink western sky, a single figure in cowboy boots and hat in the doorway, the laundromat bustling and a payphone actually being used beside the building. What’s next for this place? For these people? The tones of this print and the stance of the photographer let me know the answer: there is another day and it contains no alas.

Stop by Jenkins Johnson Gallery on Thursday, December 14th between 5:30-7:30pm to meet these intrepid photographers as well as the curator who brought them together and be inspired by their images and the strength of their seeing.

“There Is No Alas Where I Live” is a line from the poem “I Need, I Need” by Theodore Roethke, 1951.

The Grain of the Present, Pier 24 Photography’s ninth exhibition, examines the work of ten photographers at the core of the Pilara Foundation collection—Robert Adams, Diane Arbus, Lewis Baltz, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Lee Friedlander, Nicholas Nixon, Stephen Shore, Henry Wessel, and Garry Winogrand—whose works share a commitment to looking at everyday life as it is. Each of these figures defined a distinctive visual language that combines formal concerns with a documentary aesthetic, and all of them participated in one of two landmark exhibitions: New Documents (1967) at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, or New Topographics (1975) at the International Museum of Photography, George Eastman House, Rochester.

Looking back, inclusion in these exhibitions can be seen as both a marker of success and a foreshadowing of the profound impact this earlier generation would have on those that followed. Although these two exhibitions were significant, most of these photographers considered the photobook as the primary vehicle for their work. At a time when photography exhibitions were few and far between, the broad accessibility of these publications introduced and educated audiences about their work. As a result, many contemporary photographers became intimately familiar with that work, drawing inspiration from it and developing practices that also value the photobook as an important means of presenting their images.

The Grain of the Present features the work of these ten groundbreaking photographers alongside six contemporary practitioners of the medium—Eamonn Doyle, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Ed Panar, Alec Soth, Awoiska van der Molen, and Vanessa Winship. This generation embodies Wessel’s notion of being “actively receptive”: rather than searching for particular subjects, they are open to photographing anything around them. Yet the contemporary works seen here do not merely mimic the celebrated visual languages of the past, but instead draw on and extend them, creating new dialects that are uniquely their own.

All of the photographers in this exhibition fall within a lineage that has been and continues to be integral to defining the medium. What connects them is not simply style, subject, or books. It is their shared belief that the appearance of the physical world and the new meaning created by transforming that world into still photographs is more compelling than any preconceived ideas they may have about it. Each photographer draws inspiration from the ordinary moments of life, often seeing what others overlook—and showing us if you look closely, you can find beauty in the smallest aspects of your surroundings. As a result, the visual language of these photographers resonates beyond each photograph’s frame, informing the way viewers engage with, experience, and perceive the world.